1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to slide fasteners and more particularly to such a slide fastener which has an ornamental appearance compatible with a garment article to which the fastener is applied.
2. Prior Art
The role of conventional slide fasteners has been primarily to ensure efficient and smooth closing and opening of a garment fabric to which they are attached, thus with emphasis on the functional aspect of the slide fastener. Great emphasis is now on its ornamental aspect to render the fastener compatible or harmonious with a companion garment article such as apparel, sportswear, bags and the like which have recently become more and more fashionable and sophisticated. Thus, fashionableness of slide fasteners themselves is now an important design consideration in their manufacture. There have been proposed various devices for providing such fashionable slide fasteners typically by applying an ornament in the form of indicia, markings, pictorial images and the like onto the fastener tapes. In such instance, it would be desirable to locate the ornaments integrally over and across the confronting longitudinal edges of a pair of stringer tapes in order to present a slide fastener in the most impressive, harmonious manner. However, the stringer tapes carry rows of coupling elements along their respective longitudinal edges, which rows of elements tend to disrupt the continuity and integrity of the ornaments applied onto the tapes, resulting in indistinct, unsightly appearance of the slide fastener.
In attempts to eliminate the aforesaid difficulties, it has been proposed to provide a slide fastener having a continuous helical or meander formation of coupling elements attached to one surface of each of two opposed stringer tapes along the respective longitudinal edges which can be brought closely together when the fastener is closed. The opposite surface of each tape is used as a front exposed to view for application of desired ornaments by means of printing or dyeing, which ornaments are arranged to extend over and across the confronting edges of the tapes. This proposal has however met with the difficulty that the ornaments are prone to get scratched on repeated frictional contact with a slider moving to open or close the fastener. This is aggravated where sewing threads securing the coupling elements to the tapes are exposed on the ornaments, resulting in very unsightly fastener product.
It has also been proposed, as disclosed for example in U.S. Pat. No. 2,251,137, to use a pair of ornamental strips having identical ornament halves and sewn to respective stringer tapes of a slide fastener so as to couple the ornament halves together to present a continuous ornamental in closed disposition of the slide fastener. This prior art device has a drawback in that the ornamental strips superposed on the respective stringer tapes make the slide fastener necessarily bulky, hence disharmonious with some garment articles and therefore restrict the extent to which such fastener can be used in commerce. Another drawback is in that the ornamental strips are disposed to flap freely up and down as they are stitched at their blank or ornament-free areas to the stringer tapes and are therefore liable to make the arrangement of the ornaments somewhat discontinuous even when the strips meet closely together. This would be noticeable particularly when lateral pull is exerted tending to spread the opposed strips apart.